Recording session!
This week, Phyu and I booked a session in the recording room to capture both foley sounds and voiceovers for The Quest for Cup Noodles. I’ve always found this space a bit overwhelming—mostly because of the technical setup. Waking up all the equipment—microphones, interfaces, monitors—can feel like a battle before the actual work even begins.
Originally, we had a creative plan to use an online Animal Crossing-style text-to-speech adapter to generate character voices. The idea was to evoke that playful, gibberish-like speech typical of games like Animal Crossing. Unfortunately, when we tried to run the code, it didn’t work. With limited time and no working alternative, we made a quick decision to record our own mimicked versions of the sound style instead. It wasn’t exactly what we’d planned, but it actually led to some spontaneous and fun results.
The session itself got off to a rough start. One of the biggest obstacles was a technical misconnection between the composing room and the recording room, which meant that Phyu and I couldn’t hear or communicate with each other properly. I couldn’t send her instructions, and she couldn’t hear any playback. Thankfully, Lou and Annie stepped in to help troubleshoot. After some time, Lou finally diagnosed the problem—but by then, we only had ten minutes leftin our scheduled slot.
Desperate to make the most of it, we asked the next person who had booked the room if he could give us a brief extension. Luckily, he agreed, and we managed to record everything we needed within that short window.
For the foley recording, we used whatever props we could find in the studio. A piece of fabric was used to simulate the sound of someone stretching in a chair, while a metal desk lamp gave us a satisfying metallic clunk to represent the click of a door lock. This part of the session reminded me how much fun it can be to work with everyday objects, especially when sound design calls for a bit of inventiveness and abstraction.
Despite all the complications, this session taught me a lot—not only about sound recording but also about problem-solving under pressure. It also reinforced a recurring theme in this collaboration: things rarely go according to plan, but that’s not always a bad thing. Sometimes, the improvisations end up being more memorable than the original idea.